Wednesday, January 25, 2012

My husband is returning from an 8 month long deployment in just a couple days, and I am jumping out of my skin excited to have my best friend back home with us.

I realized that since I started blogging about 8 months ago, my blog has been a majority of DIY tutorials and home décor inspired posts. I have done a few posts about visitors, family, trips and what I called “Jackson’s Corner” where I shared about the joys of being a mom and what J has been up too. However, I’ve never told “my” story, and I haven’t written about my husband a lot as he has been gone since I created PB&Jstories. With his return just hours away I wanted to get personal with you all, let you in a bit and let you get to know the Pamela & Billy of PB&Jstories.

Where it beganI met Billy the summer after my Freshman year of college when I moved back from Iowa to Minnesota. My group of best girl friends had known him for years and years, and somehow our paths had never crossed until that summer. I had been “warned” about Billy before I met him, “you will have a Billy phase” “you’re guaranteed to have at least a crush on him”. He was easy to love and be comfortable with, but this I all didn’t know yet. We first met at a friend’s bonfire one summer night and it was just a small group of us hanging out. If I remember correctly, I was coming by after a double shift at work and wasn’t up for a night of being out so I knew I was just stopping by.
So we met.
We chatted and laughed.
And I thought to myself I see what they meant.
I called it an early night and as I was leaving Billy screamed out to me “I LOVE YOU” … that’s his claim to fame to this date, stating that some part knew of him we’d end up together.

We got each other’s numbers from our friends and started talking the next couple of nights, but it was all innocent. I would stop over at his house after work for short visits and we’d talk online too. My ladies were right about him. He was fun, laid back, comfortable and easy to be around. We quickly became close friends and spent almost every weekend together. Our little group of 6 friends were pretty inseparable for that summer and months afterwards.

Distance makes the heart grow fonderThen unexpectedly Billy told me he was moving back to Arizona for a while. We still weren’t officially dating at that time, or even really considered an “item”. But I knew I thought of him as more than just a best friend, he was someone I truly cared about. But, life was life and we said our “see ya laters” and he went back to Arizona and I was still up in Minnesota. We kept in contact on a daily basis, but dated other people and that was that for about several months.

After keeping in close contact with that distance my “Billy phase”continued to grow in my heart. I knew he was someone special, but things were simple with us and I knew I couldn’t push anything because at that time, bottom line was we were best friends and I was happy to have him in my life as that. Then the wonderful day came and he moved back to Minnesota.

We went from hanging out every weekend, to spending every day together. I was in college at the University of Minnesota, and he would spend days at a time at our apartment. Know those times you look back on your life and feel you were carefree and barely had any responsibilities? Those were my days. Besides going to class, I spent almost every moment with Billy. He’d go to the library while I studied with me, he helped me work on my videography projects, and he was there ready to make us dinner or go do whatever we wanted at any given time. Before we knew it Billy had unofficially moved in with us, and yet – we still weren’t officially a couple.

We truly did spend two years being best friends and learning every little detail about one another first. We spent almost every moment with one another, we would fight, we would go out and have fun, we would just sit around watching TV, we just did as best friends did.

I was ready to be more than just best friends for quite some time before we took that leap. I was waiting on Billy, for him to say he was ready to not just be best friends, but to officially be dating. He however, took his time before he was ready.

Looking back on it, boy that one is lucky I kept waiting

Making the leapEveryone knew by this point that “Billy & Pam” wasn’t just a phase. We had something special, every one could see it, we both knew it too, I think we just were a bit nervous to make that leap from best friends to a serious relationship.

Then a special weekend came.I went down to Iowa State for my best friend’s birthday celebration and an OAR concert that was playing on Campus. Her and I have been huge fans of OAR for quite some time and were super excited to be going. After the super amazing concert, we headed back to her apartment when she declared that she was going to go back and wait by their tour buses to meet them. As best friend’s do I said “oh hells yeah” and we ran back to wait to see if we could even catch a glimpse of the band. Lucky for us we were the only two girls waiting there and luck on our side when the band came through we actually got to talking with them for a bit! Typical “we love you guys, amazing concert oh my god can we get your pictures!?” They kindly humored us and posed for pictures and then continued to chat with us and offered to give us front row tickets and back stage passes for the next nights concert back up in Minneapolis. We eagerly accepted and started making our plans to make the drive back up to Minneapolis the next morning for their concert.

So the very next night I’m bouncing off the walls excited getting ready for the concert again and to hang out with OAR after the concert back stage. Billy was at my apartment while I was getting ready and said he’d just stay there so I could come back after the show and we could hang out too.
Fast forward a few hours and I come back after an amazing concert and all on cloud 9 from my “night of celebrities” and returned home to hang out with my best friend Billy.
About as soon as I walked in the door he sat me down and said he had something to ask me.
After a very sweet question I squealed of happiness as Billy and I were officially official.

He said that night his reason being was he knew I was going to always do great things in life and meet amazing people and do incredible things and he wanted to be sure he was apart of it each and every step of the way. Essentially he was nervous he’d lose me to some big hot shot celebrity, ya know, because I’m cool like that.

The rest is history up until our next exciting several months of engagement and baby J but that’s for another time and another post.

Now that you know a little more about the infamous “Willamela” team William + Pamela = Willamela {perfection right?!}

I hope you all will be right along the side of me as I get to finally welcome home my best friend that’s been gone for the last 8 months!!!!

I will be doing another post including our next “back story” of all the juicy details or our engagement, wedding & first baby.

Have you done a personal post that lets your readers in and get to know you on a personal level?? I’d love it if you’d leave a comment and share so we can all get to know one another a little better!

11 comments
:

What a great story! You guys have so much history together and that's amazing. These last hours are going to be so difficult, like waiting to open presents on Christmas morning (but even better). I can't wait to hear about the homecoming!!

Brings tears to my eyes....when I first moved to WA (almost 5 yrs ago) we were still stationed in HI. I moved here with my 3 babies and literally lived here myself with them for the first 2 years. My hubby had 3mo of training in CA and then an 18mo Iraq deployment. Being reunited after being apart for that long is something you can't really explain to people. So excited for you guys!

I love this post! What a beautiful story! I love reading more about you :)I bet you are SUPER excited to see your hubby! I know I couldn't stand being 8 months apart from my husband!I can barely stand a week when he has to go out of town (once a year) for work!Thanks for sharing, I can't wait to read the rest!

I just happened upon your blog somehow and started reading. My husband and I are nicknamed PB&J too (his initials are PB and my name starts with J). My dad called us that on the day we started dating, and it just sort of stuck. AND my guy is in the military too, so we have more than one thing in common....

I loved hearing the back story of you two! That was so awesome! I am so excited for your man to come home. My guy was in the Marine's when we first got hitched- oh so long ago. Oh yeah, I was also going to let you know- many, many moons ago when you did your song lyric art I was all, "hey I planned to copy that art piece, too" on your comments. Well finished mine. {finally- sigh}Here's my link- if you're interested.Beccahttp://gardenberger.blogspot.com/2012/01/matthew-heller-art-knock-off.html